I am using Pages on a Mac M1 with Sonoma 14.1.2, and the Search function in Pages cannot find text in added comments. However, the Spotlight function easily finds text in these comments, so the index seems to work fine. Any good idea of why and how to fix this?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.2
Pages own Find/Replace facility excludes text in comments for searches. Spotlight indexing has no such restriction as it is not part of the Pages application, and would be the tool of choice for this purpose.
You can send a feature request to the Pages product team via Provide Pages Feedback from its application menu.
Pages own Find/Replace facility excludes text in comments for searches. Spotlight indexing has no such restriction as it is not part of the Pages application, and would be the tool of choice for this purpose.
You can send a feature request to the Pages product team via Provide Pages Feedback from its application menu.
Thanks a lot for this clarification; it saved me a lot of time trying to make this work.
I was confused since the Pages handbook stated this: "You can search for specific words, phrases, numbers and characters, and automatically replace search results with new content that you specify. All visible content in the document — the main body text, headers and footers, tables, text boxes, shapes, footnotes and endnotes, and comments — is included in the search."
I guess the handbook and the application are somewhat out of sync here.
I think you misunderstood. The Pages product team, as far as changes to Pages go, is essentially not interested in features that appear in third-party word processing applications. Thus, they do not add or remove functionality on the basis of what is happening outside of macOS itself.
The last version of Pages that supported finding text in a Pages comment box was Pages '09 v4.3. All releases of Pages after Oct 2013 dropped this capability. Here is a table to reinforce that statement reflecting tests I made today:
Scrivener is a good choice.
..and the missing functionality in terms of searcing for text in comments seems to be a feature missing not only for Pages, but also for Numbers, and Keynote files on all platforms, i.e. also on iPad and iPhone.
MacFanJJ wrote:
..and the missing functionality in terms of searcing for text in comments seems to be a feature missing not only for Pages, but also for Numbers, and Keynote files on all platforms, i.e. also on iPad and iPhone.
Wouldn't you expect that behavior from Apple who is focused on basic consumer features, and not competing with more advanced third-party products aimed at prosumers and professionals? After all, these are free products in a free operating system and that does not buy engineering time as would revenue stream products in a different company.
Clearly the Pages User Guide for Mac is wrong about its ability to search for content in comments. One thing the Pages documentation team apparently did not do is test the shipping software for confirmation of their statements.😉
I agree with your reflections here, but maybe it is a bit far-stretched to reduce search functionality that was once there to avoid collision with revenue-generating 3rd party SW. After all, Pages do contain "advanced" functions like Endnote citation SW connections, whereas search functionality seems very basic. Anyhow, I am considering using Scrivener for a book creation project as a more professional alternative.
Thanks for clarifying - now I better understand the Pages product "philosophy". Anyhow, I guess that would mean that the User Handbook seemingly has been inconsistent with the SW functionality for more than a decade?
Do you have any personal experiences with Scrivener or know of an Apple Scrivener community?
And Word 16.80 will let you search comments and oddly enough, brightens the selection of the body text that contains the content rather than the found word in the comment sidebar:
I have no experience with Scrivener. Literature & Latte has Scrivener Forums.
Search function in Pages cannot find text in added comments.
